WiiHD Community Efforts

WiiHD is a huge fan of online gaming, but not just any online gaming. Core gaming in genres like racing, fighting, and shooters. So now we want to do our part to help the core Clan community on Wii make themselves known and increase their membership. We will begin listing notable clans that actively engage in clan wars in games like Medal of Honor: Heroes 2. We will however keep the gates, so not just any clan listing will be accepted. A clan needs to demonstrate viability to be listed

WiiHD is now unveiling a gallery of user created videos from Medal of Honor: Heroes 2 (MoHH2), currently the best FPS on Wii, and the only one with online multiplayer. We'll be doing this for a number of similar games as they come out. If you want your video included, just hit the link above and use the submission form.

WiiHD is your one-stop shop for hardcore gaming on the Wii.

Hardcore gamers frequently belittle the Wii for its low-power CPU, small storage space and gimicky casual games. Nintendo didn't keep their promise to focus on both hardcore AND casual games, but they did design a control system that is truly next-gen. Rumors of similar controls for PS3 and the 360 tell that tale. Sure, you can accurately control a 3D game with dual analog. You can also communicate in binary, but why would you want to? The Wii Remote rivals the PC keyboard and mouse as a control mechanism for 3D worlds, and it leaves dual-analog as a relic of the past. It can change the way games are played. Hardcore gaming isn't just about distracting ADD patients with shiny gfx, it's about delivering a whole new way of playing.

The Wii's FPS controls have finally been perfected with the release of Metroid Prime 3: Corruption. In November of 2007, Medal of Honor: Heroes 2 brought the first taste of online FPS to the system, and the most customizable controls we've seen so far. Nintendo's focus may be elsewhere, but if you buy, the games will come. The most exciting game on the menu now is The Conduit, a new original IP from High Voltage that promises the whole package for the first time. The Wii has overtaken the xbox 360's 1 year lead and has the largest install base of any console. Talk of most of them being casual gamers is a misnomer—the new casual gamers mostly live in the same household as a hardcore gamers. If developers will finally stop phoning in Wii development and give us complete games, they'll see incredible returns.

This site will follow, document, review, compare and contrast the Wii's hardcore games with your help. There's good news on the horizon. Be a part of it at WiiHD. And leave your casual games at the door.

4colorrebellion got a very nice package in his email. Images of The Conduit's manual. Goody! What secrets do they hold? Not much we don't already know. We get to see the Razor cannon (enemy weapon), we find out the Assault Rifle is the SCAR (we'd seen both the rifle and the name before, but we didn't know they were the same thing). We get a closer look at the All Seeing Eye. There are artist's renderings of several locations. And we see new alien artificats; we already knew about the portals the Conduit fan site interview, but now we see a Regenerator Unit and a Pulse Box. What do they do? My guess is one regenerates and the other pulses, but I won't say which one does which.

There are 2 factions: The Trust (which you are working for, but is also partly an enemy it seems), and the Drudge (alien). On page 9, there's a redacted portion that might refer to another party, though not another faction. The Trust have guard units in the game. The Aliens have puppet humans whom they have taken control of. There are also larval drudge known as Therm-mites and Med-mites, some of which fly, and some of which can explode in proximity to a target. The Drudge also have adult units: Drones are regular soldiers and Skimmers are flying units. And finally Scarabs are the most powerful Drudge unit (excluding bosses, no doubt). They are heavily armored and armed, and are described as tank-like.

In addition to the two characters we already know, you (Mr. Ford, Gerald Ford one assumes) and Mr. John Adams (the man behind the Trust Curtain), there is also a captured alien character, known as Alien Captive 5. He's your source of information, an he communicates telepathically. Mr Adams apparently sees an upside to the whole end of the world scenario.

My impression of The Conduit improves with each new piece of information. What do you think? Got hit up 4colorrebellion and thank him for the info.

Hit the break for all the images, conveniently broken up, and the trailer in case your one of the 6 Wii owners that haven't seen it (repeatedly) already.

A lot. That's how many. And they are generating hundreds of thousands of views too, as we anticipate the real trailer going up on Live! soon. So WiiHD is going to give them a few more views. The moral of this story? Get free traffic by making an ad and label it CoD5.

Hit the break for a gallery of the best and worst fake CoD5 trailers.
Via youtube | Permalink

Nintendo Wii Fanboy has a rock solid exclusive interview with members of High Voltage software. It's high quality and interesting, so I won't excerpt, just go read the whole thing. And then digg it for the sake of the game.

Surely not. CVG, a decent news site, has reported portions of an interview were found on The Conduit's "official website". Trouble is 1) their quote happens to match one posted on a free user fansite, claimed by said fansite to be an email interview, and 2) The Conduit doesn't have a functional official website yet and the publisher's site has no such interview anywhere I could find. Destructoid picked up the story as well, without checking facts or providing a meaningful source link to the interview cited. This is why we link to our sources. Bad CVG.

Even more troubling is neither Destructoid nor CVG seems to have any recollection of the unconventionalWii headset IGN has apparently seen. It has been described as having features that would give parents some control over who their kids talk to, but IGN theorizes that 3rd parties will release conventional headsets shortly after the official one releases and the Wii is outfitted with the appropriate firmware.

But the real point is that while googling for this supposed official Conduit website I turned up a nice "under construction" placeholder site. I gather it's legit because the domain was created in January 08, but the world didn't know about the Conduit until High Voltage went public with it on April 17th. The site also uses the same email address as the publisher, and features the same contest: that is, a contest for "alien resistant cotton armor", or a Conduit T-shirt. No word on what the shirt looks like.

Enterprising Neogafers have uncovered what appears to be early contenders for boxart for the 360 version of COD5. We're not thrilled with most of them, but the graveyard one doesn't look too bad. Hit the break for all the contenders.

In other weekend COD5 news, Destructoid has quotes (via CVG) about Treyarch wanting to "redefine" the WWII shooter genre. I'm not holding my breath, but the genre could use some redefinition.
Via NeoGaf | Permalink

Update: My visual guide has been updated. At first I thought I had two different angles on the shotgun, and labeled them accordingly, but upon further inspecting, one gun has the letters "AK6" on the side, where the shotgun does not, and several other details make it clear it isn't the same gun. The labeling has been changed.

JTRamboman, good friend of WiiHD and highly respected member of Wii Troopers, has spent away some his valuable youth gleaning important details on The Conduit's weapons cache, presumably from IGN's Hi-Def trailer and some screens. He's got names, he's got capacities, and he's got descriptions. He even gleaned some gameplay details. In other words, he's got ALL our numbers.

While we were all drooling over the pretty colors and fast pace and taking embarrassing amounts of great pleasure in the explosions and blood, JTR was being an enormous geek and actually writing stuff down looking for the devil in the details. Hit the break to see them and the trailer, then head over to gamefaqs to thank him for being a geek.
Via Gamefaqs | Permalink